Shopify client approval without giving admin access

Why the client has to sign off

I run a small agency, Runways.dev, and most of our Shopify content work follows the same pattern. The client sells something we are not experts in. Say it is climbing harnesses. We rework their product pages for search, structure and clarity, often with AI assistance for the first draft. Then someone at the client, who actually knows the product, has to check that every claim is correct before it goes live.

That check is not a courtesy. An agency can write a clean description of a harness, but only the client knows whether it is certified to the standard the copy mentions, or whether the “fits sizes S to XL” line is still true after last season’s change. The client is signing off on facts. Style is your job; truth is theirs.

Where email and shared docs break down

The usual workflow is familiar: export the new copy into a Google Doc, email the link, wait, receive comments, update the doc, send screenshots of the result, get an “ok, looks good” reply, then paste everything into the Shopify admin.

It works for five products. It breaks at fifty, for predictable reasons:

• The client approves a doc, but the text in Shopify is what you pasted afterwards. Any difference between the two was never approved.
• Comments land in three places: the doc, the email thread, a call. Nobody has the full list.
• Screenshots show a moment, not a version. Two weeks later, you cannot say which screenshot matched which approval.
• Translations and SEO fields rarely make it into the doc at all, so they are published without anyone on the client side having read them.

When a wrong claim turns up six months later, the question “did the client approve this?” has no clean answer.

What Shopify offers: staff and collaborator accounts

Shopify has two ways to give someone access to a store’s admin. Neither was designed for a content sign-off, but it helps to know exactly what each does.

Account type	Who it is for	What it grants
Collaborator account	Shopify Partners (agencies, freelancers)	Admin access to the sections the owner allows
Staff account	People on the merchant’s team	Admin access defined by roles and permissions

Collaborator accounts are for Shopify Partners. The Partner requests access from their side, and stores can require a request code that the owner shares. Collaborators don’t count towards the store’s user limit, and they must use two-step authentication. In other words, this is how your agency gets into the client’s store, not how the client reviews your work.

Staff accounts are the other direction. The store invites a person by email, the invitee logs in to an existing Shopify account or creates one, and invitations expire after seven days if not accepted. Each staff member counts towards the number of users the store’s plan allows. Permissions are fine-grained: for products, Shopify separates View from Create and edit, and from permissions on cost, price, export and deletion.

Why admin access is too much for a sign-off

Often the store owner already has admin access. The problem is that the person who must check the facts (a product manager, a technician, the founder’s business partner) often does not, and giving them a staff account raises questions nobody wants to answer for a simple approval:

• View permission shows the live product. The admin displays what is published, not the version you are proposing. The reviewer has nothing to approve until the change is already live.
• Create and edit is too much. It lets the reviewer change and publish products directly, which is the opposite of a controlled sign-off.
• It takes a user slot and a Shopify login. For someone who will approve twenty descriptions twice a year, that is a lot of setup.
• There is no approval step in the admin. Nothing in the product editor lets a named person approve a specific text before it is published.

Some agencies work around this with duplicated draft products. It gets messy quickly: duplicated handles, duplicated metafields, and a manual copy back to the real product that again nobody approved.

Approval by link: the client as a reviewer

What a sign-off really needs is simpler than admin access. The client should see exactly the change they are asked to approve, compared with what is live, and record a decision. Nothing else about the store.

This is how the agency setup in Vetta works. Vetta is the Shopify app that lets you control AI-generated content, and clients are invited as reviewers:

• The client receives an invitation and signs in with a one-time code sent by email, or with Google. No Shopify staff or admin account is needed.
• They see only the versions waiting for their decision, with a field-level diff against the live version: title, handle, description, SEO title and meta description, tags, metafields, and each translation in its own tab.
• They approve, request changes or reject, with a note. Nothing is published before an approval.
• Every version and decision is kept in the history, dated and attributed, so “did the client approve this?” has an answer.

Users are free in Vetta, so inviting the client’s technician next to the founder costs nothing. On the agency side, one login covers every client store, with a review queue across all of them. The agencies page has the details.

Setting up a client sign-off process

Whatever tool you use, the process that holds up over time looks like this:

1. Agree on who at the client signs off, by name
2. Define what they sign off on: facts, claims, compliance
3. Send the exact text, not a copy that will be edited again
4. Include SEO fields and translations in the review
5. Record each decision with a date and a note
6. Publish only what was approved, unchanged
7. Keep the history for when questions come back

The client will not remember which paragraph they approved in March. Your record should.